Musings of an Englishman living in the USA. Job hunting, writing, random thoughts and anything else that strikes my fancy.

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As 2016 winds down, I guess it’s a good time to review my 2016 resolutions and see just how well I did with keeping them and meeting the goals I set myself. (Spoiler: Not very well at all). After reviewing those, I’m going to touch on another few goals and challenges that I had set for myself and my progress therein. First, let’s take a look at each of the individual resolutions and how I did with four days to go.

New Diet

I feel like the main aim of this one (to eat out less) was certainly achieved, as I’ve definitely cooked far more often at home, and my wife and I have documented that on our food blog. Though we did go for a while without updating the blog until we kind of dropped an archive of some of the year’s recipes towards the end of November and December. The minor downside is that things became less collaborative between my wife and I due to health issues on both of our parts at various times, so it became more individual efforts with occasional contributions, which is a pity because cooking together was one of our bigger couples activities. Hopefully we can get back on track to working together in 2017 as our health issues start to resolve.

2017 Goal: Continue in the same vein, with less delays on the food blog.

New Weight

Still working on this. I’ve maintained my weight at around 220 lbs. I’m still shooting for 200 lbs, and I’ve remained committed to the gym for cardio exercise. It had been a lot of treadmill work and stationary bike work, but the treadmill work has fallen off in the last month thanks to my having a broken wrist. You wouldn’t think that would affect treadmill running that much, and it probably doesn’t, but because I’m paranoid, it means I can’t grip the treadmill handles or hit the emergency stop button in the rare cases where that might be needed. Soon I’ll be out of the cast and able to rededicate myself to treadmill running, which I enjoy greatly as a kind of zen way to clear my head. I also use the Zombies, Run! app on my phone to make things a little competitive because I enjoy the idea of metrics and leveling up with any challenge I face.

2017 Goal: Still shooting for 200 lbs, and I have a jacker picked out as a reward if I get there.

Communicate Better

Yeah, I’ve pretty much completely failed at this one. I need to reach out to my parents and sister more throughout 2017 to try and re-connect with them instead of just kind of ignoring the contact details I do have with an “I’ll get around to it eventually,” which is the utterly horrible approach I’m currently taking.

On the plus side, I feel like I’ve done better by my son communication wise. In additional to seeing him in person on a regular basis (at least until this past month where, once gain, the broken wrist has interfered and made driving exponentially more difficult), I’m able to reach out to him between visits thanks to some social media interactions. Notably, he’s became a big fan of Snapchat, so it’s been great to send him a quick picture or video message through that. I need to do it more frequently still, but there have definitely been strides made in that direction.

Let’s see, my initial target was to add an entry to this blog at least once a week throughout 2016, and this is the 52nd week of the year. If I’ve counted correctly, this is my eleventh entry of 2016, which means that i only missed this goal by forty-one entries, so I made it a whole 21% of the way towards my target. Amusingly, one of the projects I called out was my Supernatural blogwatch project, to which I managed to add a grand total of ZERO entries in 2016.

2017 Goal: Attempt to hit that once per week target. Have at least one season of Supernatural blog watch finished.

Read More

At last, a goal that I was able to achieve! I’ve been keeping track of my reading thanks to the Goodreads app. One of the things i like about that app is that you can set yourself a reading challenge target for the year. again, big fan of numerical metrics and competitive goals to meet. I’ve been increasing my targets by five books each year. In 2014, that was fifty books, in 2015 it was fifty-five. Fans of pattern recognition will realize that means that my target for 2016 was sixty books. And per that very same GoodReads app, I finished my sixtieth book of the year (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) on December 21st. this is in a bit of contrast to 2015 where I was cramming a couple of short books in early on New Year’s Eve.

2017 Goal: Ready sixty-five books. More non-fiction and less graphic novels. join a book club to read titles outside my comfort zone.

Write More

This started with the best of intentions and fell by the wayside as different life things piled up (the aforementioned health issues, moving to a larger apartment). For the second year in a row, I failed to complete the National Novel Writing Month challenge. I was actually close to getting back on track with that with a solid four day writing binge planned over Thanksgiving weekend. Then I broke my wrist and was basically unable to type or write properly for the rest of November. That means my 2017 NaNoWriMo attempt is going to have a lot of making up to do (see the goal below). On the plus side, I’m revisiting the historical fiction idea I had, and now have most of a year to gather and read the research materials to keep it a little more organized.

Outside of NaNoWriMo, I did get some more things written, even if they were mostly flash fiction pieces (a few of which made up those eleven posts for 2016…) and I also got more disciplined at outlining and planning out my story ideas. Hopefully, I’ll be able to translate that into more output for 2017.

Another thing that helped here was the establishment of a weekly writing thread on the Fark.com new aggregator website that I’ve been a member of forever. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t get a story into the Start of Farkness fiction anthology that arose from those threads though.

2017 Goal: Complete at least 150,000 words during National Novel Writing Month (Equivalent to the 50,000 for 2015, 2016 & 2017) as 1-3 stories. Successfully submit a short story for a hypothetical 2017 Fark.com fiction anthology. Also, write more short stories/flash fiction and potentially draft one novel outside of November. Possibly invest in a copy of Scrivener software.

Game More

Well, I did game more than I had in 2015, but I didn’t come close to completing the “12 video games in 12 months” challenge, unless someone can recommend 10 ultra-short games I can finish in the next four days. I managed to finish two games in 2016, mostly because I’m not a big gamer, so it’s seldom been a priority for me. I was able to finish Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the original Secret of Monkey Island. I’m also very close to finishing off the original Portal, so I might be able to claim 25% of the goal by year’s end. I have taken advantage of some Steam sales to buy/download a few games for next year. As someone who’s not been a computer/video gamer, I haven’t played a lot of these older games, so I can catch up now without having to buy a new system by playing new-to-me games which have been published since around 1999…

I’m also going to some more tabletop gaming. My wife and I did play quite a bit of Magic: The Gathering, a couple of games of Munchkin and a lot of the DC Comics Deck-Building Game when it came to card-based tabletop entertainment. I’ve also purchased some actual tabletop role-playing games in order to run some games in 2017. You’ve probably seen the fruits of these purchases as part of the It Builds Character sub-series on this very blog (A new entry of which should be coming before year’s end.)

I’ve also finally given up on Games Workshop’s miniature war games as they’ve finally priced themselves out of my comfort zone. Of course, I haven’t abandoned miniature wargaming completely and am switching over to the World War II miniatures game Flames of War. So far, I’ve purchased but not painted or assembled my first few British forces for an Airlanding Company.

2017 Goals: Attempt the 12 in 12 video game challenge again, run at least one tabletop gaming campaign (probably Pendragon) either in person or online. Purchase and assemble enough Flames of War miniatures for two forces so that I can play a few games. Start a small Star Wars: Armada force.

Inspiration can strike in the strangest ways. This is probably why most authors hate the inevitable “Where do you get your ideas from?” question.

This is my attempt to answer that question: I get my ideas from the world around me. I think everyone does to a certain extent, which is why one of the most common mantras is “write what you know,” though I do think that advice is a little misleading. After all, if I’m writing a period piece or so me far-flung space opera epic, then what I know as an English computer dude living in Delaware really isn’t applicable.

So what can inspire you? One source is dreams, which is why it’s a good idea to keep a pen and notepad on your bedside table to jot down the ideas as soon as you wake, because you WILL forget if you decide to wait until later, as I’ve learned to my cost. An infamous example of the dream as inspiration is the “Terminator” franchise. It began when James Cameron had a dream that consisted of a metal exoskeleton walking out of flames (Harlan Ellison might disagree on that form of inspiration and there’s legal reasons for Ellison’s credit on the first film, but Harlan is infamously cranky and litigious so who knows?). That dream became the finale of The Terminator and is, in my opinion, one of the best “holy crap” film moments of the 1980s.

Another obvious source of inspiration, and one partially alluded to in my Ellison aside above is whatever you might be reading. I know one of my earliest short stories was inspired by me reading Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon and thinking “I could do better than this!”

Thankfully, there are no extant copies of that story online as it was typical of a new, young writer in that it was terrible. That’s beside the point though. I read a lot of non-fiction, and listen to a couple of different history podcasts. And one of my most frequent thoughts are generally “what if this happened instead?” which leads to alternate history ideas or cross-pollination between disparate historical events and genres. What would the Roman Year of the Four Emperors look like through the lens of a fantasy world? I don’t know, but I might well find out by the end of National Novel Writing Month as that seems like fertile ground for at least fifty thousand words.

My current plan for the 2016 edition of that exercise revolves around an eighteenth century naval battle with a commander who was very much conflicted about whether he was even on the right side, which means I’m going to be hip-deep in geographical and historical research for the next couple of weeks. And that inspiration came from a single line in one of the “…for Dummies” series of books.

I also have dumber ideas inspired by mass media such as movies or television. Like most of the residents of the United States right now, I’m drowning in Presidential election coverage. Watching bits and pieces of the debates not long after finally succumbing and watching The Silence of the Lambs has lead me to a short story parody idea which so far involves Donald Trump looking in a mirror and asking “Would you vote me? I’d vote me so hard.” It’s very stupid, and I’m not sure I need the mental image of Donald Trump as Buffalo Bill, but since I inflicted it on myself, I figured I’d inflict it on my loyal readers, as few as you might be.

The last source of inspiration I’m going to consider is people watching. As I type this, I’m sat in a coffee shop facing a large window that opens to the street. This is both because I’m clearly a terrible cliché and because it’s a fantastic spot to observe the small section of the world that is my street. For example, about five minutes ago there was an African-American woman in a purple halter top engaged in an animated discussion with an older gentleman in a wheelchair. I don’t know what they were talking about, but judging by the wild gesticulations, it was clearly something both parties felt passionate about. I created a backstory in my head that it was the first meeting in around fifteen years between a school custodian and an infamous vandal who made his work a living hell. They’ve both long put such things behind them, but were reminiscing about old times in the way that people who aren’t quite friend sometimes do.

So, how do you get inspiration for your stories? I submit that the easiest way to do that is simply to keep your eyes and ears open.

He’d heard one of those cowboy actors say that. It was either Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. Right now, Scott couldn’t remember which. Either way, he thought, they were wrong. Scott leaned on the shovel and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the flannel sleeve of his shirt. He was drenched. He’d give anything to have someone else dig this damned hole for him.

Scott thrust the shovel into the ground, more reddish mud spattered against the bottom of his ragged black jeans. He’d either have to get them straight in the laundry or just toss them in the trash. Stomping on the top of the shovel’s blade with a steel-capped boot and feeling it reverberate up his leg, Scott moved another shovelful of dirt.

As far as he was concerned there were only three good reasons for digging a hole. Here in the twenty-first century, Scott worked as a bank teller rather than a pirate of the Barbary Coast, and so was unlikely to be burying a wooden chest full of doubloons. Hell, he’d never even seen a doubloon and he worked with money literally every day.

That meant his first good reason, digging up buried treasure, no longer counted as good and hadn’t for close to three hundred years.

His second good reason would be to plant something. After all, there were always plenty of people using the allotments in the community garden center the city council opened last summer. Scott frequently saw women (it was nearly always women, for some reason) carrying shovels around. They had to be digging something. Based on half the cooking shows he caught on the TV, Scott figured the women were all planting some green weed called “kale.”

If anyone had ever said Scott had a green thumb, then either they were lying, or Scott had caught an unfortunate infection in the hand. He knew he wasn’t a gardener. Hell, even the cacti and artificial plants he’d tried to take care of withered and died.

That left Scott with exactly one good reason to dig a hole, to hide something. Scott chuckled to himself, as that was kind of the reason he had been digging for the past couple of hours. It also explained why he wasn’t able to hire someone to do this particular menial task for him. Another firm stomp on the shovel’s blade sent the vibration up his leg and the tool’s wooden handle bucked against his hand burying a splinter in the fleshy arc around the base of his thumb. Scott cursed, dropped the shovel, which bounced against the ground, and started to pull the wooden slivers out of his hand.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Scott said, “No bad one either, I guess.” Scott manhandled the plastic-wrapped body of his wife into the freshly dug hole and started to shovel the red dirt back into place.

“They’ll never know you’re here,” he spat at the corpse.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Three Good Reasons.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

It smelled like pork roasting in a barbecue pit. The crackling sounded like the campfires of his youth in the boy scouts. If not for the searing pain as the flesh bubbled and burned away from Seth’s legs, it would be pleasantly nostalgic.

As things stood, though, being cast into the pit of fire was an exercise in pain tolerance. Aside from the agony as his lower legs burned through to the nerves and bone, Seth’s lungs screamed as he tried to breath through the belching plumes of jet-black smoke. He coughed, involuntarily and tried to hold his breath out of habit.

Intellectually, Seth knew that he no longer had a physical form that needed to breathe or feel pain, yet the spectral form he assumed was his soul thought otherwise. He knew himself to be as insubstantial as the black smoke that filled the pit, but somehow whatever remained of his brain was telling him that he was in an unending tumult of pain and fire. Seth clawed at his ethereal throat as once again his spirit tried to breathe through the thick, dark fumes.

How had he gotten here?

Intensive care nurse Sarah Chapel shook the thermometer, willing the mercury to settle at a saner temperature number. The red gauge in the thermometer was bubbling as the fluid began boiling. There was no way the patient had a temperature of over six hundred degrees and a regular heartbeat.

As Sarah went to dispose of the obviously faulty thermometer, the unmistakable smell of smoke buffeted her nostrils. She turned to look at Seth Adams’ bed as it erupted into flames. As the hospital’s sprinkler systems kicked on, she heard the distinctive whine of a flat line from the patient’s EKG monitor.

Nurse Chapel tried to help put the fire out, and wondered why there weren’t any doctors nearby to officially pronounce Adams dead.

What the hell had happened?

Seth reached a pain singularity. The inferno consuming him had overloaded his nerve endings and he could no longer feel pain, or anything else. His spirit was as numb as his spectral body. He stared ahead with dull, lifeless eyes.

The smoke wreathing him began coalescing into a coherent form. At first, two snake-like eyes formed level with Seth’s own. The thing took shape, starting with three spiraling smoky horns jutting from the top of its head. From within the noxious vapors, a fanged mouth distended into existence. As the form in the darkness developed wings of shadow, it spoke, its voice a multitude of sepulchral tongues speaking out of synch.

“Seth Adams,” it boomed with a thousand echoes, “your world has forsaken you as it has for so many before you.”

Seth barely managed to choke out a strangled “Why?”

The smoke form’s eyes bored into Seth’s own as a cacophony of its voices breathed, “You know why. Remember.”

Seth saw the naked crimson body of his wife with stab wounds in her abdomen. His hand held a bloody knife.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Suitably Warm.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

She always wore candy apple red lipstick. Ethan never knew why, but every time she came in, those candy apple red lips stood out against her pale skin. She didn’t wear any other makeup.

Ethan sipped at his bourbon and coke, looking at her across the bar. He hoped she noticed him, without noticing him looking at her. He’d been coming here after work every day for three months. Three months of wistful glances and cheap booze for a pair of red lips that didn’t know he existed.

Her eyes drifted over to him. Ethan immediately looked at his wrist, hoping that she couldn’t tell he didn’t have a watch on.

An hour, and two bourbons and cokes later she slipped away from the bar and walked out to the street. Ethan noticed that her high heels were the same candy apple red as her lipstick.

Ethan gave himself a couple of minutes before following her outdoors. The doorway was wreathed in blue-grey cigarette smoke. He bent at the shoulders as he coughed. Ethan stood up, straightened his tie and muttered a prayer to himself. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and walked over to her. She was leaning in the doorway of the sushi restaurant over the road and talking on a cell phone.

“No, Rick,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice, “I said 10:30 TONIGHT. It’s been two damn weeks, you had plenty of time to make arrangements,” she said.

Ethan caught himself smiling and tried to bury it before she could spot him eavesdropping on her. He strode forward, and gave her a nod of familiarity as he walked past. He pushed on the door of the restaurant as if to go in. Unfortunately, the door was locked as the place was closed.

She laughed. “You’re going to have to get your California roll somewhere else,” she said. Her voice was just loud enough for Ethan to hear.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Let’s cut the bullshit. I’ve seen you watching me for a while now. I don’t know why you haven’t at least come over to say ‘hi’ or anything,” she said

“Sure. If you’re buying, I might let you call me Jackie by the end of the meal. Give me a call.” Jacqueline gave Ethan her phone number. He returned the favor.

The next night, Ethan slunk to the bar again. He looked around for Jacqueline and her candy apple red lips. She wasn’t there. Ethan slid into a darkened corner booth and dialed her number.

Immediately, something exploded in the parking lot. Running outside, he saw a Volkswagen Beetle burning. It was candy apple red.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Candy Apple Red.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

For months now, the world stank of piss and putrefying flesh. The constant drum-roll of German shell impacts drowned out the buzzing of a billion angry flies. But what really bothered Private Liam Jenkins was the omnipresent mud. The filthy stuff coated everything and you never truly got clean. At the rate things were going, he’d still be breathing this foul mud by the year 2000.

He hoped that he would escape out of this Belgian shit-hole by then. A hubbub of activity among the non-commissioned officers sure made it seem like they had heard something from the brass. He assumed that old Haig had given the order to go over the top and hoped to God that the Hun’s machine guns would make Jenkins’ inevitable death come quick.

Not like Thompson, whose death seemed to stretch on for hours. The only reason he knew it wasn’t days was because the sun never set. Jenkins ended the man’s burbling screams of agony with a bullet to his throat. He could still the body entangled in the barbed wire.

He could remember when enlisting seemed like a good idea, back when a young woman handed him a white feather. She branded him a coward for not “fighting for King and country.” What the King wanted with this rain-soaked bog of shit, mud and corpses eluded Jenkins. Still, the Kaiser obviously gave it some importance, so Jenkins and the rest of his unit tried to take it back inch by painful inch.

By the flurry of activity, Jenkins assumed the unit were about to fight for another inch. He wiped the grime off his wedding ring and kissed it. He doubted he’d see his Lizzy again. Three men either side of him knelt in prayer. It’s true, Jenkins thought, there really are no atheists in foxholes. Jenkins didn’t know what he believed about God, but he damn sure believed in Hell. He’d lived in it since the mid February.

Two minutes later, as the setting sun bathed the mud-choked battlefield in an ugly crimson hue, Jenkins finished answering nature’s call and pulled the duckboards away. As he clambered out of the trench, his foot stomped down on gristle and bone of a severed arm. A fading stripe on the sleeve suggested the arm had once belonged to a corporal. Jenkins kicked it away as he crept on to the battlefield, his rifle at the ready.

He felt the shock wave of what he fervently hoped was the last artillery shell launched at the German lines seconds before he heard the roar of impact. Maybe it would kill a few of the enemy, or better yet, flatten some of the infernal barbed wire. Jenkins slithered forward on his stomach, trying not to think about the staccato bullets of the enemy machine guns as he advanced. Then came pain and blood as his earlobe ripped away.

Unable to go on, Jenkins stood up and bolted back past his own lines as bullets zipped all around.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “shreds of doubt.” It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

The mud stained Sandra’s fingernails as she scratched at the rain-soaked ground. The soft earth gave way to her frenzied digging until she banged her fingers against the ash wood box. Her tears mingled with the raindrops beating against the box lid. Sandra pulled the box against her, leaving an ugly brown stain on her dark blue dress. She headed inside, prising the battered lid off the box on her way.

Sandra curled up on her battered leather sofa and spread the contents of the box on her coffee table. Two moldering photographs, a pair of friendship bracelets and a rough grey stone with “Caitlin + Sandra 4ever” scrawled on it crudely in white chalk. Sandra gripped the stone tightly, feeling its coarseness against her palm. She found the grittiness against her skin oddly comforting. She raised her eyes heavenward and began to whisper.

“Will you remember me when I see you again? I know I could never forget you. I tried for a while.” Sandra took a deep breath and picked up the first photograph.

She turned it over and looked at the back of the yellowing print. The words “Dewey Beach vacation, June 12, 1983” were scribbled on the back in felt tip pen. Had it really been that long? Sandra wondered. It felt like yesterday. She turned the photograph around and looked at the picture of the two of them. In her mind they had been children, looking towards Mom’s old Kodak camera and flashing matching gap-toothed smiles. The girls in the picture looked older, almost in their teens and something about Caitlin’s eyes made her look ineffably older. Those eyes looked as world-weary as Sandra felt, sitting their holding a memory three decades old.

The other photograph lay face down on the table. Sandra couldn’t bring herself to look at that one yet. Instead, she picked up the braided friendship bracelets with their red, white and blue almost painfully bright in the dark, storm-lit room. She inhaled them and just for a moment she could smell that distant summer again. The salt air, the artificial sweetness of cotton candy and the coconut smell of Caitlin’s suntan lotion. For a moment, the years disappeared and Sandra became the devil-may-care child in the photograph again. Her sigh broke the illusion and brought her back to the here and now, with rain beating a grim tattoo against her windows.

“We were supposed to last forever,” she said. The room swallowed the words into oppressive silence. Steeling herself, Sandra turned over the second photograph. This one didn’t have anything written on it, instead the date was printed on the photo in impersonal sans serif type. “06 January, 2003.” The black and white photograph only pictured Caitlin, those same ineffable eyes stared lifelessly at the Medical Examiner’s camera, framing the bloody opening of Caitlin’s fatal wound.

“We were supposed to last forever.” Sandra murmured, closing her eyes.

Sandra still gripped the second photograph tight three days later when her sons found her body on the couch.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “why didn’t it happen to me?” Apparently, I was feeling rather maudlin in my interpretation of it. It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.